Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery by Meg Muldoon Read Free Book Online Page A

reveal of your husband cheating on you could get.
    It was the morning. He was in the shower and his phone buzzed, the way it did when he got a text message.
    I don’t know why I looked. It was just one of those things. It rang, and I checked it.
    There wasn’t even anything explicit or incriminating in the text message. But I knew it was from her.
    Something just clicked. I couldn’t explain it. But I just knew. At some higher level, I just knew.
    When he got out of the shower, I confronted him. I had his phone and wouldn’t give it back to him until he admitted what he had done.
    He broke a lamp in our room and stormed out.
    I spent the first weekend in December crying and screaming and yelling at him. And I made him tell me everything. Every last heart-wrenching detail.
    It’d been going on for six months. He was going to tell me, he said. He was working his courage up to tell me.
    But he was clearly a coward. Six months of working on his courage, and he never told me what he needed to.
    Things just weren’t the way they used to be, he said. He told me I’d been spending too much time at the shop and not spending enough time with him. He said I wasn’t married to him anymore, not really. I was married to my business. He said I’d been pushing him away for years.
    He said all these things, but none of them were the real reason he was leaving me. None of it was the real reason he’d started up an affair with a woman who had been one of our best friends.
    I still didn’t know what the real reason was. Maybe he just fell out of love with me. I didn’t like to think that, but it might have been the truth. 
    When I finished yelling at him and throwing every curse word in the English language at him, I kicked him out of the house and told him I never wanted to see him. Ever.
    And for the past two years, my wish had yet to come true, but it was beginning to. He still lived in the Christmas River area. With her . But after the divorce, I didn’t run into him much, if at all. They’d moved closer to Metolius Valley, a town a little bigger than Christmas River about 20 minutes away. And for the time being, that seemed to be far enough.
    I’d been doing my best to overcome it, to be the strong person I knew I was deep down, or at least the one I wanted to be. It hadn’t been easy. The wound still felt fresh sometimes.
    But I was doing better. My shop was doing great. I was getting along on my own just fine. I had the support of Warren and Kara, two people who had been my rocks through the divorce.
    Sometimes I regretted things. Like making the decision to move from Portland back to Christmas River. Sometimes I thought we should have stayed in the city longer, maybe the boredom of a small town made him do things he might not have done otherwise. Maybe he felt suffocated here. Maybe he was right. I did love my business more than him. Maybe there was some truth to that.
    Then I’d regain my senses, and realize that even if all that was true, there was still something else.
    He’d still cheated on me. With my friend.
    And there was no excuse in the world that would cover that one. 
    In the meantime though, I had made the life around me okay. I had made it bearable. I was getting better every day. I was starting to feel alive again. Starting to feel like I wasn’t an inverted zombie, all dead and rotted on the inside. I had started to feel like maybe there was still hope for me.
    Then… this had to happen. That homewrecker shows up at the one thing I take pride in, and tries to ruin it for me.
    I wanted to wring her by her scrawny neck and scream at her at the top of my lungs Haven’t you done enough???
    An old couple walked behind me on the bridge, their heavy steps making the bridge shake. I leaned farther over the railing, not wanting to make eye contact. Being that it was a small town, the chances of me knowing them was pretty high, and I didn’t feel in the mood to chat.
    They passed by quickly, thankfully, and